Culinary Literature

What you need to know to find your path in this fast-growing industry. Ever dream of exploring a career in culinary arts or cooking but don't know where to begin? "Culinary Careers For Dummies" is the perfect book for you! Packed with advice on selecting a culinary school and gaining on-the-job experience, it offers up-to-the-minute information on everything culinary novices need to enter and excel in the food service industry.

"When you're cooking, you're a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful microbes. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses. In Culinary Reactions, author Simon Field explores the chemistry behind the recipes you follow every day.

Schlosser argues that the fast food industry is responsible for the growth of malls, the widening wage gap, and the obesity epidemic. He discusses facts about food production and preparation, the ingredients and taste-enhancers in the food, the chains' efforts to reel in young, susceptible consumers, and other unsettling facts.

Could loving to cook translate into being a professional under the tutelage of the famous chef of a three-star New York restaurant? Buford jumped at the chance to find out. This energetic account of his intense culinary education brings readers into the scalding kitchens where fine food is prepared by obsessive chefs for whom timing is critical and cooking is art.

In his 2006 blockbuster, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," Michael Pollan gave voice to Americans' deep anxiety about food: What should we eat? Where does our food come from? And, most important, why does it take an investigative journalist to answer what should be a relatively simple question? In the hundreds of interviews Pollan gave following the book's publication, the question everyone, including me, asked him was: What do you eat? It was both a sincere attempt to elicit a commonsense prescription and, when it came from cynical East Coast journalists, a thinly veiled attempt to trap the author. "Oh! So he shops at farmers markets," we snipped enviously to one another. "Well, easy for him out there in Berkeley where they feast on peaches and cream in February! What about the rest of us?" "In Defense of Food" is Pollan's answer: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Powell, a frustrated secretary in New York City, embarked on "the Julie/Julia project": a yearlong odyssey of cooking every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." She blogged about her project and quickly became an online sensation. In this memoir, Powell imaginatively reconstructs episodes from Child's life in the 1940s and weaves them into her own story of her year, which changed her in ways that she hadn't anticipated.

This amusing memoir describes the author's culinary career, exposing the seedier side of New York restaurants. Although a love of good food shines through, Bourdain is bluntly critical of food fads, vegetarianism, employees and himself.

More than just a companion to the hugely popular show, "No Reservations"is Bourdain's fully illustrated journal of his far-flung travels. The book traces his trips from New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, mixing beautiful, never-before-seen photos and mementos with Bourdain's outrageous commentary on what really happens when you give a bad-boy chef an open ticket to the world.

Homer called salt a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. Today we take salt for granted: a common, inexpensive substance that seasons food or clears ice from roads. But, as Mark Kurlansky relates in this world-encompassing book, salt--the only rock we eat--has shaped civilization from the very beginning.

Fugu. Dog. Cobra. Bees. Spleen. A 600,000 SCU chili pepper. All considered foods by millions of people around the world. And all objects of great fascination to Tom Parker Bowles, a food journalist who grew up eating his mother's considerably safer roast chicken, shepherd's pie and mushy peas. Intrigued by the food phobias of two friends, Parker Bowles became inspired to examine the cultural divides that make some foods verboten or dangerous in the culture he grew up with while being seen as lip-smacking delicacies in others. So began a year-long odyssey through Asia, Europe and America in search of the world's most thrilling, terrifying and odd foods.